- So the 1920s are a fascinating decade
in American history.
1920 is the first year in which the United States
is designated a majority urban nation on the census.
It's a time of tremendous demographic change
in American cities and American regions.
And it's a time of cultural flourishing.
We think of the Roaring 20s in New York City
where we're sitting,
the Harlem Renaissance.
What role do women play,
these newly empowered women play,
in these cultural movements?
- One of the most exciting things about the 1920s
is just watching how women,
you might say they explode with energy and excitement
at just having the vote.
It's not that they used the vote particularly,
but that they become
women in the way in which we recognize them,
so no longer the sort of secondary, subservient,
and so on, but people in their own right
doing their own thing.
So for example,
we notice almost immediately that the clothing women wear
changes dramatically.
You know that the long dresses
and the long skirts,
and the you might say almost dowdy appearance
of you know even young active women
in the pre-war period
gives way by the early part of the 1920s
to skirts that get shorter,
get shorter and shorter and then finally
just barely cover the knee,
undergarments especially corsets are reduced to a minimum.
Corsets are pretty much gone.
The shape of the body,
you know the ideal shape, has moved from the hourglass shape
you know which of course required tightening up
pieces of one's body with the undergarments and laces,
and that's now disappeared,
and the straight, we would call it the Twiggy, body
has emerged.
You can see women's legs,
you can see their knees,
you can see their bare arms and so on.
The hair gets cut short,
so the chignon, the hair wrapped around the head,
disappears in favor of bobbed hair
or short hair.
And womens' appearance therefore
is dramatically just on its face freer.
Now you know that's part of
a much larger sense of who women are,
and you can see that sense everywhere.
One thinks about the silent movies, for example,
and Lillian Gish who both plays
the ingenue and the sort of vulnerable young woman
who nevertheless has a kind of strength
and who is herself a movie producer
and who manages to
you know both be a great star and to cultivate
a studio herself.
You can see it in the romance of the movie industry
in the way women flock to the movie industry.
You can see it in automobile culture,
the notion that you know as in the movies
where you can actually sit and be an audience in the dark
with a guy, you know,
that's a big change from the pre-war period.
To the automobile where you could actually
go take a ride to a place
where there was no parent or chaperone watching you
and return from that place an hour or more later,
and who knows what you would've been doing.
You know there's a palpable freedom
I'd have to say.
And I'd also have to say
that that expresses itself sexually,
that suddenly from a relatively
you know tight,
supervised,
fear of losing one's virginity,
it becomes not exactly appropriate
to have sex before marriage,
but it's no longer as frowned upon
as it used to be.
So in all kinds of ways,
the flapper image
and flapper life reflects
a kind of new freedom among women.
- Could you tell us more about flappers,
who they were,
what the flapper lifestyle entailed,
how it was viewed?
- Well let me tell you a little bit about
the flapper by using one of my favorite examples,
Lillian Hellman, who we remember now
as a rather famous and sometimes dark playwright
of the 1930s and 40s,
but who born in 1905, came of age in 1925,
went to college for a year or so,
came from a modest middle class family,
you know did a year or two of college
and then dropped out of college
and took a job in a publishing house,
where at the age of 20 or so
she is already partying, drinking,
which though alcohol is now illegal in the 20s,
it is widely available nevertheless
in private kinds of places.
Where she stays out all night,
where she smokes,
where she expresses her own opinion freely,
and where she is economically independent.
So though she continues to live with her parents
until she marries,
the money she earns is her own.
She spends it on clothes,
on you know leisure
kinds of activities,
and she represents herself
as the kind of quintessential
irresponsible, somewhat flighty,
somewhat flaky,
unconcerned with deep political kinds of things,
but otherwise completely autonomous and independent.
And she can remain a flapper until she marries,
but after marriage of course,
there then is a question about whether
the lifestyle that she had adopted before marriage
can and should continue.
Now in Lillian Hellman's case,
she actually continues the lifestyle,
but that's frowned upon.
So you know while people are rather indulgent
of the flapper lifestyle before marriage,
after marriage,
it's not quite so acceptable.
I have to say that there are versions
of the flapper lifestyle in the African American community,
and again they are somewhat different
because women have had a somewhat,
especially middling, women of the middling sort,
have had a somewhat more autonomous
and independent lifestyle
than have white respectable middle class women.
But in the black community,
it manifests itself in a flowering
of cultural energies and activities.
So you know one thinks for example immediately
of Zora Neale Hurston for example,
who comes to Barnard in the early 1920s on a scholarship.
One thinks of the Harlem Renaissance
and of the women who become both
the partners of men but also poets and novelists
and so on in their own right.
And one thinks of the way in which
in the 1920s,
women's capacity to support and sustain
not only their own lifestyles
but also the lifestyles of their families
becomes part of the particular flapper image
in the African American community.
- You're reminding me of one of the central tenets
of our course,
which is that a focus on women in work
simultaneously allows us to understand
significant and well known moments
in American history differently.
So in this case to understand that there is a
real gender politics and a real women presence
in the Harlem Renaissance.
- Yeah that's a really good point to make,
and I'm glad you made it
because of course that's true of flappers in general,
but women in particular.
So now you know
before when we've talked about wage earning women,
we've talked about women of relatively limited means,
for the most part, some exceptions of course,
but for the most part.
And we've talked about work itself
as something somewhat out of the ordinary
for the middle, middling kind of women,
not respectable for and not desirable for
African American or for white women.
But now in this flapper period,
work becomes part
or can become part of a woman's self-image.
Whether that women becomes a novelist
or an anthropologist as Zora Neale Hurston started out,
or like Lillian Hellman,
you know a young woman who starts out as a clerk
in a literary enterprise
and ends up
being a famous novelist herself.
It's that all kinds of women
are now imagining work,
creative work, satisfying work,
the sense of themselves as workers,
you know as people with something to contribute
beyond and outside of the household roles,
even beyond and outside of the extended household roles.
That's the big transition in the 1920s.
- I couldn't help but think when you mentioned
Lillian Hellman living with her parents
but keeping her wages,
of the Rogaczewski children we met at the tenement house
who of course went out to work
but brought their wages home as part of sustaining
a really subsistence level household economy.
- Exactly right, and whereas boy children
under the Rogaczewski circumstance
might be able to retain a larger proportion
of their income,
the girl children almost universally
just simply turned over their whole wage packet
to their parents.
But Hellman's parents,
you know by no means affluent but reasonably
you know middling income and okay,
didn't need her wages,
didn't want her wages.
But the having of money in one's pocket of course
immediately opens up a world that wasn't open
to the Rogaczewski daughters for example.
- And this distinction goes to something
you talked about in the introduction
that we'll hear you say more about in our next section,
which is the way in which work means
different things for different women.
And of course it's a reminder
that our course is not about a universal women's work,
but rather about the many ways in which
women's work is constituted for many different women
and different class, racial, ethnic, religious positions.
- I think that's a good point to interject here
because you know it's
possible even though it's wrong
to talk about working women
as though they were a single unit,
and even when we separate wage earning women
from other kinds of workers,
we nevertheless think of working women
in a certain socioeconomic category
which is relatively poor.
We don't think about working men that way.
We think about working men as running the gamut
from very rich to very poor.
And now in the 1920s,
we have just the beginning of the possibility
of thinking that way.
So that even those women who are
quite well off and who choose
like Hellman to go out into the wage labor force
rather than simply to be dependent on their families,
and they do it,
they do it for fun,
you know they do it for satisfaction,
they do it because they want to be engaged
in some lively element.
In Hellman's case,
you know she had sort of imagined herself as a writer
but didn't really think that she could
ever be a writer.
And then she went to work for a publishing company,
and she encountered all kinds of well known
writers and went to parties with them,
and suddenly she had the aspiration
to become a writer.
So work for her,
and she worked all of her life,
took on a very different meaning
than work for the Rogaczewski children for example,
or even work for the young woman
who you know could work and become a buyer
in a retail store,
and therefore imagine herself
living an independent and unmarried life
outside the normal family function.
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